This morning, Cisco is expected to lift the curtain on Project California, a data center solution that falls into Cisco's unified computing system. Since December, sources have told Channelweb that Cisco's forthcoming California offering is a blade server.

Late last week, however, Doug Gourlay, Cisco's director of product management for data center solutions, said bluntly that "Cisco is NOT building a blade server" in a blog post called "Building A Better Blade Server—Network Style."

And Gourlay is right. Cisco is not just building a blade server. Sources have told Channelweb that Cisco's Project California and unified computing strategy will include a data center solution package that will tie together a new line of Ethernet switches, a new data center management console and, yes, a blade server based on Intel's Nehalem processor. The products, sources said, will be bundled together without the possibility to purchase them separately, though it is not an all-in-one box. What the solution does is tie together the network and computing layers, putting computing power into the same equipment that also handles storage capacity and core networking.

In an interview with Channelweb earlier this month, Gourlay said Cisco's unified computing strategy works toward a "system in balance" for the next-generation data centers. Gourlay said Cisco's data center solutions will provide a purpose-built, high-performance network; tighter coupling between the compute, storage and connect elements; and a singly management system for virtualization and policies. Essentially, the unified computing system boils the network, computing, virtualization and management into a single solution. It is expected to be able to manage and automate movement of virtual machines and applications across data center servers.

The ultimate goal, Gourlay has said, is to make data center computing as automated as possible, while also cutting the costs and amount of gear needed to fuel a next-generation, virtualized data center.

While Cisco has been tight-lipped about the actual details, it is expected to unveil its new data center products this morning at an event in New York.

Along with detailing product, Cisco is also expected to reveal a host of technology partners that will help power its unified computing strategy. Sources have said those partners will include BMC, EMC, Intel, Microsoft and VMware.

Several Cisco partners have said that a blade server offering from Cisco would help them get into accounts they wouldn't have been able to access in the past, offering a true unified data center and virtualization solution.

Cisco's plan will also put Cisco into a heated competition with other server vendors, like Hewlett-Packard and IBM, companies that have historically contributed server solutions to complement Cisco's networking gear.

Along with sparking a new competitive landscape, Project California has the potential to rock the foundation of enterprise networks and data centers, with Cisco offering not only the routing and switching solutions that power the network, but also the servers that control the data center, and tying them together through one management console.